The events in Charlottesville continue to reverberate. While Nazi torchlight parades and chants of "Blood and Soil!" are a disgusting display and street brawls are little more than theater -- usually -- the upshot in Charlottesville was the terror-by-vehicle tactic deployed against the so-called counterprotesters (watch how that term is twisted and turned this way and that to normalize the Nazis as the genuine "protesters.")
One was killed and dozens were injured on the ground. Two state police officers observing from above were killed when their helicopter crashed.
It was a debacle for all kinds of reasons.As we inch closer to Labor Day, we need to keep that in mind.
The day did not go well for anyone.
It seems to me this was the tipping point we wondered if it would ever come.
Trump demonstrated clear unfitness for office and inability to lead with his pathetic and contradictory responses to the events in Charlottesville. He was so far out of touch with the zeitgeist he seemed like some alien entity plopped down in front of a teleprompter to say just the wrong things and repeat them, at a time of public mourning and national moral crisis. He failed every test of leadership.
In normal times, that would mean he's done. In these times, it's hard to say.
But note well that he's effectively installed a military junta to run the country should his regime collapse -- as it appears to be doing.
Mattis at Defense, McMaster at DHS (the key domestic agency -- thanks Cheney!) National Security Advisor and Kelly (ex-DHS) in the White House as chief of staff. There seems to be bipartisan support for these fine fellows, each of whom is practically worshiped by both parties and many in the Overclass. In other words, if the Trump regime goes down, these three can instantly elide from their current positions to ones of executive control, without objectionfrom the People Who Matter.
The US experiment with constitutional self-government will reach its final end.
Though I'm sure the junta, like Octavian in Rome, would say they are protecting and restoring the Republic. Bless their hearts
Events of this magnitude take place after Labor Day, so we have a few days to psych ourselves up.
Ms Ché and I are scheduled to visit Acoma Pueblo on Labor Day. There is a whole story to tell about what happened there when the Spanish came a-calling in 1598. Needless to say, it wasn't pretty.
Acomans survived it in sufficient numbers that they are still around; the mesa-top village was rebuilt along with the huge San Esteban mission church, one of the largest in New Mexico, and today, the Acoma pueblo and surrounding territory are major tourist destinations. Despite survival, Acoma today is a very different place than it was before the Spanish conquest.
My bet is that the US will become a very different place after Labor Day this year, but I wonder how many people will notice.
There has long been a significant sector of the US population that would prefer military rule to the messy "democracy" that's been teetering on the verge of collapse for a generation.
I started a post yesterday in which I attempted consideration of US Independence Day vis a vis the Current Crisis of Britain as a consequence of the Chaos following the Brexit vote -- seen through the lens of my newly found British ancestry. Well, not surprisingly, it didn't work and I never completed the post. It may languish in draft form for the foreseeable future, or maybe I'll just delete it.
This post will take something of a different tack.
Today marks my father's 115th birthday. He was always very proud that he was born on the 5th of July (1901), as that made him a patriotic child of the new century. His birth, he thought, marked the transition from what used to be to what would become -- the Future in other words.
My father considered himself to be Irish-American through and through. His father was the son of Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1850 -- or thereabouts. This date contrasts with the story I was told about them, but that's another story...)
Actually, I haven't found the immigration date of my father's grandfather James, but James's parents (Alexander and Mary) arrived in 1850 along with several of their children and in-laws. James is not listed among them, nor are a couple of other of their children. I'm assuming they were still in Ireland and came over later, probably in 1852 or so. Family histories are murky about dates and such. At any rate, James, my father's grandfather, got to the US somehow at some date, and after settling into Iowa (his parents and siblings, after a relatively brief sojourn in Ohio where there were uncles and cousins, moved to Iowa in 1856), he acquired farms and land in Scott County, outside of Davenport. James married Alice (also an 1850s immigrant from Ireland) and they started a family on the farm. Alice died shortly after my grandfather's birth in 1869). James married again three years later, to a woman named Margaret -- who was also an 1850s immigrant from Ireland -- and they had one son together. As time passed, James retired from farming and moved upriver to Clinton, where his son (my grandfather William H) had a law office and James's daughter Katherine (also spelled Catherine) had lived for some time with her husband -- who was also descended from Irish immigrants.
My father's mother was German-American. Her mother, Veronica, was said not to have spoken English. Her father, Reinhold, did speak English, though his accent was said to be heavy. My father never knew Reinhold, his grandfather, because Reinhold died in 1901, two weeks after my father's birth. My father had little to say about his mother Elizabeth Veronica. She died in 1940, about a year before my father's father William H died, so I never knew either of them as they were long dead by the time I came around (in 1948). I heard some things about Elizabeth, my grandmother, specifically about how she faced prejudice during WWI, because of her German ancestry. My father indicated that her family were well-off enough to get through that difficult period, but he seemed to resent the fact that his mother had had to face the cruelties of American xenophobia at all. It seemed to affect him, though, in that he essentially buried his own German-American ancestry, rarely mentioning it, and typically focusing on the fact that he was Irish-American, and that's what he passed on to me. I therefore was Irish-American as well.
Yes, well... but what about my mother?
She claimed not to know much about her ancestry, but from what she did know of it, she claimed an aristocratic lineage. What she liked to say was that she was "a direct descendant of Marie Antoinette!" With a toss of her auburn haired head to express the exclamation point. Well, no, I don't think she was actually the sad French queen's descendant, but when I looked into her ancestry, I found it led back -- and back and back -- to the Drakes in England. Through the Drakes, she may indeed have had some tiny fraction of English royal blood, though I found no direct connection with English kings and queens.
I had long thought that her grandmother Ida was an immigrant from England. This was because my sister had had one encounter with Ida when she came out to California to visit from her home in Indiana -- where my mother had been born in 1911.
My sister said she thought that Ida was British because she spoke with an accent and had "that demeanor" about her.
Well, it turns out that Ida was not from Britain. She was born and raised in Indiana. Her father was from New Jersey, though, where his family had been since the 1600s. Their ancestors, in turn, were from England and it is through them that I found the connection with the Drakes.
There was also a connection with a New Jersey character named "Princess Snowflower," the daughter -- or perhaps the sister -- of "King Nummi," the "last of the Lenni-Lenape Indian chiefs of Cape May, New Jersey." Princess Snowflower was -- apparently -- my mother's grandmother's great grandmother. Got that? Good.
There is some dispute over whether "Princess Snowflower" was actually an Indian Princess at all, however. Some accounts say that the story of "Princess Snowflower" was made up in the 19th century to romanticize the history of a girl -- who was actually a descendant of someone who came over on the Mayflower. You would think her actual ancestry would be romantic enough, but apparently not.
I don't know what to believe about it. It's just another data point. At any rate, through her female line, I found nothing but English ancestry -- except possibly for "Princess Snowflower."
My mother's father's side provided some roadblocks, however.
My mother didn't know much about her father as he was killed when she was five years old, and she was raised by her mother and step-father. They didn't have a whole lot to say about her biological father.
I was able to find out a lot about him through Ancestry.com and various newspaper archives, none of which provided a flattering picture, but I ran into a roadblock tracing his ancestry. I could find nothing regarding his paternal ancestry prior to his grandfather who was apparently born in Virginia in 1798. Where the parents came from is something of a mystery. Possibilities include England, Ireland, Scotland, France or even Spain.
My mother's father's mother, however, was much easier to trace, as she was a descendant of the Lawrences of New England -- which would make her heritage English quite solidly.
If my mother's mother was (mostly) British, and my mother's father was (mostly) British, that would make me at least half British wouldn't it? Kind of puts the kibosh on my Irishness, no?
It's definitely disorienting.
I never had much regard for the British, and the current hoo-hah over the Brexit vote is kind of funny, actually. My Irishness makes me instinctively suspicious of British motives and actions -- there is little reason to believe much of what is presented as "truth" by the British because they lie. It's part of the culture. Who knows, maybe it's genetic.
Consequently, much of what we're told by the British is probably false, and the spectacle surrounding the Brexit vote is likely mostly phony and for show. That Tony Blair is being resurrected to explain is a sure sign of duplicity at the least.
There's also been some chatter-- yesterday at any rate -- that proposes the American Revolution was somehow a "mistake." Would things have been better if it had never happened? Possibly, who knows.
But it did happen, and here we are.
So many things that might have been never were and won't be because of what actually happened.
There is more and more speculation that Britain will not actually leave the EU, but that the kingdom itself may break apart. The breakup of the British Isles into component parts is somehow pleasing to an onlooker like myself, almost as if it were inevitable like the break up of the Soviet Union and so much of Europe following the collapse of the world that used to be. The EU has not been a pleasant replacement, far from it. So the EU may collapse as well. Led by the Brits.
If that were to happen, it would eventually mean the end of the USA as we've known it, wouldn't it?
Isn't it something that the SBSD and the LAPD can issue a tissue of lies, a veritable festival of them when it comes to it, regarding Dorner and his last few hours -- and get away with it, while Dorner himself quite likely told the truth about misconduct he witnessed within the LAPD and got his ass fired for it, his life ruined and finally ended, in one of the most gruesome and yet inevitable endings we've seen since Waco.
It's pretty much the definition of the era we live in.
Just when everyone was focused on the various assaults, stompings and arrests that have arisen during the current contentious election season, hundreds of thousands of Americans ventured onto the Mall in DC to Rally for Sanity and/or Fear. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert conducted the festivities under the bright fall sun, while satellite Rallies took place all over This Unhappy Land to boost and celebrate whatever position one has, either Fear or Sanity, depending.
Attendance at the Sanity and/or Fear Rally was apparently far greater than the Beckapalooza in August and the One Nation event earlier in October. Beck used the sophisticated and allegedly unlimited media power of the FOX conglomerate and the dazzling star power of Sarah Palin to turn out what may well have been fewer than 100,000 people to "Restore America." The One Nation rally relied on the sophisticated and allegedly unlimited organizing power of the unions to turn out perhaps 50,000 on the Mall, and Stewart and Colbert used the not inconsiderable but not particularly sophisticated and certainly not unlimited star and media power of Comedy Central to turn out hundreds of thousands of exasperated Americans who simply want the political bullshit to stop. Or so they say.
Media Stars and Media Power. Glenn Beck has long eclipsed FOX's honored elder Bill O'Reilly both on the basis of overt psychosis and on the basis of ratings and fandom. He is the titular Leader of the Tea Party "Movement" -- step aside Sarah -- and has a strongly messianic view of his own sweet self that practically anyone who's dealt with People In Recovery knows all too well.
Beck's star power and FOX's media power is -- or was until yesterday -- unparalleled in the cable teevee realm. Until yesterday, his ability to rally Americans to his incoherent, religiously insane "cause" was considered the surest sign of the political direction of the masses, and that direction was obviously to the Right, much farther to the Right than America's rulers and the elites who serve them want to go just now, indeed, so far to the right that the specter of Fascism looms -- and is welcomed by his followers.
Stewart and Colbert have brought the Media Power of FOX and the Star Power of Beck (and Palin) into... question.
The notion that what's left of the unions had the kind of organizing power they once did is foolish at best, often just a deliberate distortion. Unions have been faltering and diminishing for decades in this country, partly due to the furious assaults on them from the corporate and political sphere, and partly due to their own internal weaknesses and dysfunction. The One Nation rally had no star power to speak of and it was not given the kind of Media boost that Beck got from FOX and most of the rest of the major mass media. The One Nation rally was barely acknowledged by the ostensibly wild-eyed "activist" Blogosphere.
Not surprisingly, its attendance was "modest." There were many tens of thousands there, to be sure (Washington is a union town, after all), but not as many as at Beck's "I Have A Nightmare for You" event.
Comes now Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, a couple of comic stylists in the satiric vein, both of whom have shows on the cable teevee on Comedy Central (a Viacom Company), both of whom present mock "news-talk" shows that often feature politically high and mighty guests. Even the President himself appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other day.
While there was considerable pre-rally coverage of the Sanity and/or Fear event it was by no means as relentlessly flogged as the Beckathon had been by FOX and many other news outlets. It was initially thought of as a sideshow, a carnival of pranksters and freaks, a relatively feeble effort to capture some of the spotlight from Beck and Palin. Stewart and Colbert are very highly regarded as observers and commentators on the passing scene, at least among "liberals and progressives" (whatever they are these days), but they have never been seen as either movement leaders or ralliers for any cause.
From his Brazilian hide-away, however, Glenn Greenwald spotted something that disturbed him in Jon Stewart's growing media presence and personna: the problem of false equivalence. The issue for Glenn and others is that some political positions and policies are so odious and dangerous they simply cannot be equated with positions and policies that are relatively mild and benign. By trying to bridge the gap between "one side" and "the other," by making mock of both, Stewart and Colbert (to a lesser extent) run the risk of falling deep into the error of fostering beliefs about the political realm that have the effect of supporting the ever more rightward and authoritarian tilt of the status quo, and worse, inspiring passivity about it.
And that, not surprisingly, has been the biggest criticism of what happened on the Mall yesterday. Passionate people are incensed that these Media Stars would mock them and call for comity, mutual respect and understanding. Absurd! OUTRAGEOUS!!!!™ Impossible! The Other Side is the Purest of Evil; to suggest otherwise, let alone to act upon it, is the Work of the Devil. It merely empowers Satan!!!!
Yes. Well...
I don't have cable teevee, so I don't watch what the cable "news" personalities or their mockers have to say more than occasionally when I see it on an InterWebs replay or I'm in a hotel. Not having cable means that I haven't been brainwashed -- yes, I think that's the right term -- by the very strange interplay between the Powers That Be and the constant marketing efforts that emanate from the cable all the time. Because I don't watch it regularly, I don't obsess on what this or that cable personality says -- the way, for example, Digby has made a Blogospheric career out of her obsession with Chris Matthews and his spittle-flecked Wrongness.
But I do see these things from time to time, and to an extent I follow the running commentary about them that is not just a feature of Digby's Place, but is pervasive throughout the Blogosphere, on both sides of the political spectrum, and is in fact a core function of the Blogosphere. Without constant furious media criticism, there would be nothing to talk about on the InterWebs, né? Well, Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, but how long will that last? You see?
So. I'm aware of, but not particularly involved in the constant sniping at the Media from the Blogosphere. I've staked out a tiny little niche in my own Blogospheric and commentating efforts where I sometimes offer criticism of the critics as it were. So often, it seems to me, the furious criticism of the Major Mass Media and the Political Class it serves utterly miss the point.
How so? Simple: Stewart and Colbert were making mock, but they were making a point, too. The political system is broken and the media's partisanship makes things worse. We need to Come Together Right Now to solve the serious problems that affect us all. Stop the Violins, Visualize Whirled Peas! That's all well and good. There's a problem with it, though.
Our political and governmental system (at least to the extent it involves We the People) is not intended for the People's participation in the Solution To Problems. I would go so far as to say it never was, and on those very rare occasions when the People are actually consulted, the result is often enough governance contrary to the public interest and will.
This is a severe flaw in our political and governance structure, based in the Constitution itself and the long history of self-government under it. We the People simply don't get a vote on the major issues of the day nor on the policies and programs Our Rulers choose to institute. That's not what elections and the political process are for. At best, an election serves as an advisory on how quickly and how harshly programs and policies already adopted or in the pipeline for adoption should be implemented.
We do not vote, for example, on whether or not Our Rulers will pursue Empire. They do it, we have no say in it. We may or may not be able to influence how the Empire is instituted and consolidated, but not whether it is done, at least not through our votes.
So it is with all the major policies and programs of our Ruling Class. We the People have so little say in what they do that the notion of America's Great Representative Democracy is a complete joke.
None of the Media Stars get into that. (Beck skirts it, but only from a partisan perspective -- "They prevent us from exercising Our God-Given Sovereignty... yadda yadda," they being the ObamaSocialistFascistMaoistCommunistStalinist Hitlers, not the Benign Corporatists who simply want What's Best For Everyone and will exterminate all foes.)
We have a fundamentally corrupt and non-responsive government run by and for a diminishing cadre of the Ruling Class for its own (generally pecuniary) purposes. Our vote is irrelevant to them, and nearly irrelevant in the vaster scheme of things.
As Chris Hedges pointed out in a talk and article I linked to in an earlier post, it's delusional to think that we can change this state of affairs with our votes. We can't.
But what we would have to do to really change it is so disturbing to think about it's hardly even talked about. Even Hedges is reluctant to get into the gory details.
Neither Stewart nor Colbert will address that fundamental truth, except by accident. Beck will discuss it, but only from his messianic and purely partisan perspective. He wants what he wants himself, on behalf of his sponsors, and he will brook no opposition, opposition being Of The Devil and all.
We're in a very strange situation. As I've said many times over the years, if there is a forceful and violent Revolution in this country, it will come from the Right, not the Left. Every single indication demonstrates the truth of that observation. The largest contingent in the middle will continue to attempt to mediate (as Stewart and to a lesser extent Colbert try to do on their shows, and they tried to point out was the Best Way at their Rally yesterday), but the fervor and the energy that could lead to Revolution is all on the Right -- where it has been for many years.
The Bushevik years, for example, were filled with Revolutionary action at the top of the political and economic pyramid. The Revolution they were conducting at the top is being consolidated by the current regime, and We the People have essentially nothing to say about it.
Stewart and Colbert can see what's going on, I think, but they advise doing nothing about it besides pleading with Our Betters to be less hostile with one another, and excoriating the People for Taking Sides.
That's not a matter of Glenn Greenwald's false equivalence, it's a matter of fundamental institutional collapse. Since We the People have no say in what is done by Our Rulers, and they're off on a completely different track than that of the Public Interest, the problem isn't comedians trying to mediate between what are basically phony "sides", the problem is the collapse of our often faulty Republic and its replacement with Empire on behalf of a small and diminishing Ruling Class.
So far, few but the most radical libertarians have noticed, but they offer no comprehensive (or desirable) alternatives.
As is often said, "We Are Doomed." Well, at least until we take matters out of the hands of the Ruling Class and their Running Dogs.
[The best part of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear for me was Stephen Colbert's Giant Puppet of Fear Puppet, "Fearzilla", a subtle yet appropriate skewering of the widespread Blogospheric denunciation of Giant Puppets at various anti-war and other rallies in the past.]
The Lame Duck Congress met and heard from the Big Three Automakers regarding a $25 billion bridge loan to tide them over until some of their restructuring and adaptations to the New Economy can be made. The usual huffery and puffery transpired, and much hoo-hah about corporate jets and what not, but eventually the real issue became clear: American car makers are in a bind; the market for new (big) cars has collapsed and it is not going to revive soon, especially not if the other parts of the economy don't improve. So. The car companies say they need a loan for now in order to stay in business while they restructure for current conditions, making sure their suppliers are paid, their workers are employed, their retirees are taken care of.
It makes a lot more sense on its face than the Paulson Extortion Scheme the Congress was Johnny-on-the-Spot improving and approving just a couple of months ago.
But Congress could not bring themselves to approve the Big Three automakers' request for loans and loan guarantees. They cannot bring themselves to approve a moritorium on home foreclosures and the restructuring of mortgages to keep people in their homes. They cannot bring themselves to approve anything that would actually keep ordinary people working and in their homes.
The only thing they can do is hand over trillions of dollars to CEOs and Smart Guys -- the very Wizards who brought on the financial collapse -- on demand and under orders.
They cannot do anything for people. Oh. Sorry. They did extend unemployment benefits for a few weeks.
Whoo-pee.
The foreclosure crisis that is at the bottom of the economic collapse has been going on for two years or more, and Congress has dithered about it the whole time. Done nothing. They have been told by some of the Smart Guys who were extorting them that they better not do anything about the mortgage crisis, for it would be "unfortunate" to interfere in the market that way. "Let it sort itself out."
Yet the longer this drags on, the worse things become. There is now real panic abroad in the land because the economy is not recovering and all the trillions paid in extortion to the financial sector has done nothing to bring relief. In some ways, the extortion payments have made things worse.
Congress approved those payments -- essentially giving a blank check to the Treasury Secretary to do his will -- and the American People were ripped off in the biggest and most obvious heist in world history.
But comes an opportunity to actually do something positive for the American People, the answer is "No."
Congress is completely useless for the purpose of representing the interests of the American People. All they can do is take orders from the White House and serve their corporatist/imperialist masters.
Now, there will be all kinds of explanations for what has happened to the Financial Markets and Why the Bailout Isn't Working. But perhaps the best explanation I've heard so far has come from "This American Life" on NPR.
The System is a Confidence Game, a Protection Racket, a Ponzi Scheme, and the System failed because it's based on nothing but what can be squeezed from "below." And when "below" ain't got nothin', or it seems like it, Boom Goes the Dynamite, and it all falls to pieces.
That's what happened.
The massive infusion of money from the Treasury in the end will not affect the outcome measurably at all. The Game itself has stopped. Or at least the portion of it that the cash infusion is supposed to "help."
Parts of the Financial System are still working. Loans are still being made, credit is still available and the wheels of industry are still idly turning (not that we have much industry left). Some of the price inflation that has made people's lives so miserable has mitigated. What collapsed was not at the root of the System of Finance and Capital but was on the margins, in all those strange derivatives and credit default swaps and what have you, margins that were pumping lots and lots of essentially bogus and worthless "value" into the System, through a Protection Racket and a Con Game. Lots of workers in the Financial field got rich playing this game, and of course they didn't want it to stop.
But it had to. And when it did, POOF! All that "value" that was never really there in the first place, disappeared. And lots of people in the Financial Industry started screaming. The Bailout/Extortion was designed to prop up the marginal Phony Value sector until the most of the players had a chance to get out of it. It's not just too little too late, though. All these marginal products had become disbursed throughout the System, padding bottom lines here, there and everywhere. All this toxicity needs to be removed through some sort of purge of the System. The Extortion Scheme is supposed to buy up all the toxicity and remove it in an orderly manner. But because of the way things are mixed up in the System, that may be easier said than done. There may be a lot of failures of "fundamentally sound" institutions because the toxicity can't be separated any more.
This may be why the Graybeards and Wise Guys who run the System have been reluctant about or resistant to the notion of actually helping out at the bottom of this teetering pyramid of debt, by helping homeowners who are facing foreclosure. The foreclosure and subprime crisis has been going on for years. Millions upon millions of homes purchased in the last few years have been seized and families forced out of what they thought were their homes. It's tempting to blame them and ignore the elements above them in the System that caused the problem in the first place. But the reluctance of the System to help them in this crisis -- and there is certainly no urgency whatever to assist homeowners in a bind -- seems to have more to do with the fact that the System doesn't see the problem in foreclosures. In other words, it's never been about those subprime mortgages. In fact, the majority of those allegedly "toxic" mortgages are still performing fine.
The problem -- as far as the Wise Guys are concerned -- is well above the individual mortgage level and the value of individual properties. They really don't care what happens at that level. If it mattered to them, they would have called for intervention long ago.
No, the problem is all the "Protection" that's been sold and re-sold based on artificial and inflated values (not just mortgage and real estate values), "Protection" that is essentially worthless.
THAT'S what the problem is, that's what the Extortion is being demanded to cover.
There isn't enough money in any combination of treasuries to do it. Since it was all based on fantasy -- if not outright fraud -- anyway, the notion of covering these bets out of tax revenues (or more borrowing) gets into realms of faith and belief that beggar description.
So.
It seems that the Masters of the Universe are trying to use the Hooverite pre-Great Depression methods to prop up the System, by covering some of the bets at the top of the teetering pyramid, and they will find (like Hoover did) that it doesn't work. It makes things worse. This time, though, the Masters have convinced themselves that it will work.
It's way too late to prevent the Finance System's problems, but it may not be too late to shift the focus from the "top", however.
As has been pointed out, some of the System, the traditional loan and credit portions of the System that don't rely on all the toxic products for "value," are working more or less well. There is some difficulty in some sections, but be wary of the auto industry's plaints, for example. They are claiming they can't get loans to purchase inventory on the one hand, but on the other hand, they're saying their showroom traffic is down by half or more. And they are trying to make out that the customer can't get loans, which isn't exactly true. The dealers can't get loans for inventory purchases. But they can't sell the inventory right now anyway. So what are so fretful about? They don't need the inventory. They can't sell it. Nobody is in the market for a new car right now.
So it is with many of the businesses claiming inability to get credit. It doesn't mean that credit isn't tighter than it was; it's just that things are not necessarily as bad as some of the louder voices want to make out.
Which doesn't mean they won't get much worse.
The focus has to shift from the "top." The Masters of the Universe got their demands met, more or less, but it won't do them much good. If the masses are unable to buy and sell and live relatively decently because they can't get jobs or they don't have homes, or whatever the case may be, then all the fussing over and currying of the Masters isn't going to make much difference. Attention has to shift immediately to the conditions ordinary people are facing -- should have actually been focused there all along -- and efforts to increase employment, fund infrastructure, energy transition, health care and education, and any number of domestic priorities has to enter the equation. Incomes for the masses have to rise, and those of the rich have to fall.
Fundamental to what needs doing is the revival of the notion of Public Interest, and Public Good.
When we get to that point, then we'll know the Reagan Revolution is well and truly over.
The Congress is about to appoint and fund a Royal Overseer -- some call him a King in his own right -- to disburse gargantuan amounts of money to banks and large financial institutions of all kinds, in order -- they say -- to keep the economy afloat.
But Americans know what it is: a Heist. Extortion of the purest sort. "Protection money."
They're being held up for ALL their coin. "Spare change?" Everything.
Oh there's a bit of slapdash afterthought "oversight" and "accountability" skimcoated over the Heist. Yes, it will be done with all due diligence, all due efficiency, all due speed. After all, if the money isn't handed over pronto, in large denomination unmarked bills, the Economy gets it, right between the eyes.
Some of us realize the Economy has already suffered a mortal blow, and paying out sack-loads of money to the perpetrators now is not going to save the situation.
I think even our dumbest Congresscritters and media personalities sense it, even if they don't quite understand it. They are trying to sell this heist as a way to insulate or save "Main Street" from the vicissitudes of "Wall Street." But it won't do that; it will have no perceptible effect on Main Street, and cannot "insulate" anything or anyone except the corporate pillagers and their handmaidens from the malestrom that has already begun.
This is like convincing yourself that paying your extortionist will somehow keep you safe: it won't. It can't.
That's why so many people are saying, "Look, the crash is already under way; bailing out Wall Street (or whatever) is not going to prevent or reverse it. Let the 'financial system' fail. It will anyway. Use the money for infrastructure, use it to keep people in their homes, to give them jobs."
But that won't happen as long as Reaganism continues to rule.
On the other hand, things are likely to get so bad so fast that any injection of taxpayer money into Wall Street will have no effect at all, and the "$700 billion" -- or whatever -- will never be paid...
Even the wingnuts seem to be recognizing that they can't escape the economic whirlwind -- or is it a hurricane -- on the prowl for its pounds of US flesh. While they are still busy claiming to be blameless, as all Republicans always are for everything, it seems to be dawning on them that they can't run from whatever consequences are on the way. And they can't tax Libruls enough to save their own behinds.
It boils down to a matter of taxation and who will be stuck with the ultimate bill and how. Because we are going into a "socialistic" phase (call it National Socialism, Nazi, if you prefer, since everything is coming from Above, nothing being generated from Below, and to date it is all a matter of fusing government and corporate interests) all these bailouts and all of them yet to come will ultimately be paid for through 1) inflation, 2) taxation, 3) continued seizures of resources domestically and overseas.
If there were any real Socialism involved, of course, the Mighty Rich would be forced to pay a punative level of taxation, basically confiscatory of everything they've gained in the last decade or so. Any income over say a million a year would be taxed at 90% or more. Capital gains over a certain amount likewise. Oh, most of the wealthy would still be wealthy, but they would not be able to profit from the economic conditions immediately preceeding the current mess, and won't be able to profit from what's to come, at least not in the short term.
If there were any real Socialism involved, then the people with mortgages scheduled to "reset" -- ie: increase interest rates -- to an unaffordable level would have their mortgage interest rates frozen until such time as the mortgage could be refinanced through a government program that stabilizes interest rates at a reasonable level (say no more than 6% or 7%) for up to 50 years, and returns up to 50% of any gains in real estate value to the government. That way, at least for the time being, most of the families living in houses which might soon be foreclosed upon will have a reprieve, and those who are able to make reasonable mortgage payments will keep their homes, thus stablilizing the housing market. (Note: It's been claimed that most of the millions of foreclosures so far have been on speculator and investor owned properties and that "real families" haven't been forced out of their homes, at least not in any great number. That's a nice claim. I'd like to see the facts.)
If there were any real Socialism involved, the banks and financial institutions who participated in the gaming of the real estate market would be forced to eat their losses, and yet they would not be allowed to fail without provision of alternative banking/financial institutions. Investors and stockholders would lose their gains over the past decade or so, but that would not necessarily mean they would "reset" to zero.
If there were any real Socialism involved, the services provided by Government (which means through general taxation) would include basics like health care and education, social welfare, utilities, clean water, healthy environment, transportation and communications infrastructure, and so on. It's not rocket science, it's all been worked out in great detail over most of the civilized world long since. Americans need to catch up.
The Masters of the Universe want to make it impossible for Americans to catch up to the rest of the world. Given what they are setting out to do right now -- to save their own asses at the expense of everyone else -- they are likely to succeed in the short term.
Americans show no sign, whatever, of bestirring themselves en masse to interfere with the secret plotting and planning going on now to saddle them with gargantuan debt for many generations to come in order to keep the best off among us in wealth and privilege forever. A permanent aristocracy to rule over them is being established as we speak, about which most Americans are completely oblivious.
What are any of us going to do about it?
Most will do nothing at all.
A few -- very few -- still have their monkeywrenches...
